Here’s what I expect to see at Wednesday’s Apple event

Like everybody else who covers Apple—from the lowliest blogger to the best-paid Wall Street analyst—I take my cues from Mark Gurman, whose rumor round-up last week will either 1) secure his reputation as the premier Apple reporter of our age or 2) prove to be his comeuppance.

Gurman is confidently predicting a 3-ring circus with new iPhones, a new Apple TV and a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro as tent poles. I’m with him for two out of three,

iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. Following the every-other-year pattern established with the iPhone 3G and 3GS, Apple is expected to reduce the price of the 6 and 6 Plus by $100 and offer a pair of updates in the same format but with new features: A Force-Touch screen (dubbed 3D Touch, according to Gurman), a less-bendable chassis, a 12-megapixel camera capable of shooting 4K video, a faster A9 processor and a new color option (rose gold).

New Apple TV. This is the year, everybody seems to agree, that Steve Jobs’ “hobby” will mature into a full-fledged platform with a new price ($149), a Wii-like motion sensitive controller, voice-controlled universal search and a software developer kit with which thousands of apps will migrate from the small screen in your pocket to the big one in the living room.

iPad Pro. Here’s where Gurman and I part company. He’s expecting Apple to use Wednesday’s occasion to unveil the long-rumored iPad Pro with a double-wide screen and optional stylus and keyboard. Unless Apple plans to hold us there for three hours, I think the iPad Pro will probably get its own event.

Extras: Sales updates in the round numbers Apple loves to trot out, a date for the Apple Watch OS update, and a musical guest. I’m still holding out for Taylor Swift.

Apple: Seven questions for Mark Gurman

Want to know what Apple’s planning to unveil tomorrow? Read Mark Gurman. That’s what everybody else is doing. In advance of the big event Wednesday, we put some questions to the reporter with all the answers.

What do you consider your biggest scoop this go-round?
I think all the stories this time around add up to something bigger, but I love the stories people call “impossible” until they actually happen. This time around, there has been a lot of doubt about the $149+ Apple TV pricing [more than double] the current price in a category where Apple is now running fourth behind aggressively-priced rivals.

Which detail from your 9/9 walk-up you are least certain about?
With Apple, plans can change up until the very last minute, like iOS features that missed the cut for iOS 8 but showed up in iOS 9. I know what I published was true when I published it. Beyond that, it is out of my control.

Still convinced it will be a 3-ring circus (new iPhones, new Apple TV, new iPad Pro)?
Yes, and given the large venue, I think it makes a lot of sense.

Compare and contrast your reporting to John Paczkowski’s at BuzzFeed.
John is fantastic and definitely was the person in this field I have looked up to the most.

Still hankering for a career in TV?
I’m leaning heavily towards continuing my journalistic work in the future, but I’m open to other opportunities.

Any contact yet with Apple PR?
I’m guessing they’re still busy preparing for all the announcements on Wednesday.

Are you going to be there Wednesday? If not, how will you be following the news?
Nope, I am back in Ann Arbor for my senior year at the University of Michigan. I plan to watch the live stream on my TV.

Apple will likely debut a bigger iPad next week

Next Wednesday, Apple AAPL will cram a big crowd of journalists, executives, and other lucky people into San Francisco’s Bill Graham Auditorium, and will reportedly unveil, among other things, a bigger iPad.

The bigger iPad has been rumored for quite some time, but 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman—a prolific Apple news whisperer—reported Wednesday that Apple will almost certainly materialize on Sept. 9. Trip Chowdhry, managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, also told Fortune that the device will likely debut next week.

Geared toward power users, the “iPad Pro,” as Gurman reports it is actually named, will sport a 12-inch display, run iOS 9.1, support a Force Touch-based stylus, and have speakers on two sides. The iOS 9.1 operating system will reportedly include special versions of the Siri and Notification Center interfaces.

With all that said, there’s still a chance that Apple won’t reveal the bigger iPad next week. Pre-orders are slated for October, and shipments for November, so Apple could be planning a special event for it in October, according to Gurman.

Other rumored announcements for next include new iPhones, a revamped Apple TV, new bands for the Apple Watch, and possibly a new iPad mini.

WWDC: Meet Mark Gurman, Apple PR’s worst nightmare

John Gruber and Joshua Topolsky, two of the best reporters in the business, were riffing on the air last week about what Apple would have done to Mark Gurman if WWDC were a spy movie and Apple a truly evil corporation.

Something terrible. Cut brake line. Bullet in the back of the head. Murder.

Young Mark Gurman, as Gruber calls him, took it as the compliment it was. At 21, a rising senior at the University of Michigan, he’s no longer the teen blogging phenom I profiled three year ago. He’s not much of a secret either. When Techmeme last month began listing authors by how frequently they are linked to from news and social media sites, Gurman topped the list, ahead of reporters at the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and Re/Code. He’s become a one-stop shopping site for mainstream media trying to keep up with Apple news. His work was cited in more than two dozen posts on Fortune.com in May alone.

There’s no magic to it. Gurman has good sources in both the developer community and within Apple, and he works them relentlessly. I confess that I was skeptical in January when he reported on 9to5Mac that four ports would be replaced with one in Apple’s next MacBook. I should have known.

But it’s at WWDC that Gurman’s shoe-leather reporting shines brightest, and he’s worked this year’s event harder than ever. If you want to know what’s coming Monday — or at least what’s expected — you might as well start with the round-up Gurman published Friday. It’s the post everybody else is linking to, including Wall Street analysts.

I caught up to Gurman on Saturday at his parents’ home in Los Angeles where, lacking an invitation from Apple, he will watch Monday’s keynote remotely. He’s got one more year in Michigan, where he’s taking a lot of technical courses — software design, server structure, data analysis — at the School of Information. To carve out more time for coursework he cut back this year on day-to-day rumors to focus on the big scoops. After graduation he’s thinking about business school — he likes Stanford — and relocation to San Francisco or New York.

He’s cagy about what comes next. Perhaps a start-up. Perhaps television, where someone like Gurman who knows what he’s talking about would be a welcome relief from today’s talking heads.

“I like the spotlight,” he says. “I feel like I’m capable of bigger things than just writing about Apple.”

WWDC: Apple rumor checklist – updated

Mark Gurman was 18 years old and still in high school when he scooped the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and several dozen full-time bloggers with a series of eight predictions about what Apple AAPL was going to unveil at WWDC 2012.

Gurman is back this year with a bumper crop of WWDC predictions — 36 by my count. Here’s the checklist I made from his most recent rumor round-up. He edited it a few hours before the keynote, so he’s got no excuses.